THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND.
'There is a vulgar view of politics which sinks them into a mere struggle of interests and parties, and there is a foppish kind of history which aims only at literary display, which produces delightful books hovering between poetry and prose. These perversions, according to me, come from an unnatural divorce between two subjects which belong to one another. Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.' These very just remarks are made by Mr. Seeley in a new book which everybody has been reading, and which is an extremely interesting example of that union of politics with history which its author regards as so useful or even indispensable for the successful prosecution of either history or politics. His lectures on the expansion of England contain a suggestive and valuable study of two great movements in our history, one of them the expansion of the English nation and state together by means of colonies; the other, the stranger expansion by which the vast population of India has passed under the rule of Englishmen. Mr. Seeley has in his new volume recovered his singularly attractive style and power of literary form. It underwent some obscuration in the three volumes in which the great transformation of Germany and Prussia during the Napoleonic age was not very happily grouped round a biography of Stein. But here the reader once more finds that ease, lucidity, persuasiveness, and mild gravity that were first shown, as they were probably first acquired, in the serious consideration of religious and ethical subjects. Mr. Seeley's aversion for the florid, rhetorical, and over-decorated fashion of writing history has not carried him to the opposite extreme, but it has made him seek sources of interest, where alone the serious student of human affairs would care to find them, in the magnitude of events, the changes of the fortunes of states, and the derivation of momentous consequences from long chains of antecedent causes.
The chances of the time have contributed to make Mr. Seeley's book, in one sense at least, singularly opportune, and have given to a philosophical study the actuality of a political pamphlet. The history of the struggle between England and France for Canada and for India acquires new point at a moment when the old rivalries are again too likely to be awakened in Madagascar, in Oceania, and in more than one region of Africa. The history of the enlargement of the English state, the last survivor of a family of great colonial empires, has a vivid reality at a time when Australasia is calling upon us once more to extend our borders, and take new races under our sway. The discussion of a colonial system ceases to be an abstract debate, and becomes a question of practical emergency, when a colonial convention presses the diplomacy of the mother-country and prompts its foreign policy. Mr. Seeley's book has thus come upon a tide of popular interest. It has helped, and will still further help, to swell a sentiment that was already slowly rising to full flood. History, it would seem, can speak with two voices—even to disciples equally honest, industrious, and competent. Twenty years ago there was a Regius Professor of History at Oxford who took the same view of his study as is expressed in the words at the head of this article. He applied his mind especially to the colonial question, and came to a conclusion directly opposed to that which commends itself to the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge.[1] Since then a certain reaction has set in, which events will probably show to be superficial, but of which while it lasts Mr. Seeley's speculations will have the benefit. In 1867, when the guarantee of the Canadian railway was proposed in Parliament, Mr. Cave, the member for Barnstaple, remarked that instead of giving three millions sterling with a view of separating Canada from the United States, it would be more sensible and more patriotic to give ten millions in order to unite them. Nobody protested against this remark. If it were repeated to-day there would be a shout of disapprobation. On the other hand we shall not have another proposal to guarantee a colonial railway. This temporary fluctuation in opinion is not the first instance of men cherishing the shadow after they have rid themselves of the substance, and clinging with remarkable ardour to a sentiment after they have made quite sure that it shall not inconvenience them in practice.
[1] The Empire, by Mr. Goldwin Smith, published in 1863—a masterpiece of brilliant style and finished dialectics.
Writing as a historian, Mr. Seeley exhorts us to look at the eighteenth century in a new light and from a new standpoint, which he exhibits with singular skill and power. We could only wish that he had been a little less zealous on behalf of its novelty. His accents are almost querulous as he complains of historical predecessors for their blindness to what in plain truth we have always supposed that they discerned quite as clearly as he discerns it himself. 'Our historians,' he says, 'miss the true point of view in describing the eighteenth century. They make too much of the mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about liberty. They do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia.' 'I shall venture to assert,' he proceeds in another place, 'that the main struggle of England from the time of Louis XIV. to the time of Napoleon was for the possession of the New World; and it is for want of perceiving this that most of us find that century of English history uninteresting.' The same teasing refrain runs through the book. We might be disposed to traverse Mr. Seeley's assumption that most of us do find the eighteenth century of English history uninteresting. 'In a great part of it,' Mr. Seeley assures us, 'we see nothing but stagnation. The wars seem to lead to nothing, and we do not perceive the working of any new political ideas. That time seems to have created little, so that we can only think of it as prosperous, but not as memorable. Those dim figures, George I. and George II., the long tame administrations of Walpole and Pelham, the commercial war with Spain, the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, the foolish prime minister Newcastle, the dull brawls of the Wilkes period, the miserable American war—everywhere alike we seem to remark a want of greatness, a distressing commonness and flatness in men and in affairs.' This would be very sad if it were true, but is it true? A plain man rubs his eyes in amazement at such reproaches. So far from most of us finding the eighteenth century uninteresting, as prosperous rather than memorable, as wanting in greatness, as distressing by the commonness and the flatness of its men and its affairs, we undertake to say that most of us, in the sense of most people who read the English language, know more about, and feel less flatness, and are more interested in the names of the eighteenth century than in those of all other centuries put together. If we are to talk about 'popular histories,' the writer who distances every competitor by an immeasurable distance is Macaulay. Whatever may be said about that illustrious man's style, his conception of history, his theories of human society, it is at least beyond question or denial that his Essays have done more than any other writings of this generation to settle the direction of men's historical interest and curiosity. From Eton and Harrow down to an elementary school in St. Giles's or Bethnal Green, Macaulay's Essays are a text-book. At home and in the colonies, they are on every shelf between Shakespeare and the Bible. And of all these famous compositions, none are so widely read or so well-known as those on Clive, Hastings, Chatham, Frederick, Johnson, with the gallery of vigorous and animated figures that Macaulay grouped round these great historic luminaries. We are not now saying that Macaulay's view of the actors or the events of the eighteenth century is sound, comprehensive, philosophical, or in any other way meritorious; we are only examining the truth of Mr. Seeley's assumption that the century which the most popular writer of the day has treated in his most glowing, vivid, picturesque, and varied style, is regarded by the majority of us as destitute of interest, as containing neither memorable men nor memorable affairs, and as overspread with an ignoble pall of all that is flat, stagnant, and common.
Nor is there any better foundation for Mr. Seeley's somewhat peremptory assertion that previous writers all miss what he considers the true point in our history during the eighteenth century. It is simply contrary to fact to assert that 'they do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia.' Mr. Green, for instance, was not strong in his grasp of the eighteenth century, and that period is in many respects an extremely unsatisfactory part of his work. Yet if we turn to his History of the English People, this is what we find at the very outset of the section that deals with modern England:—
The Seven Years' War is in fact a turning point in our national history, as it is a turning point in the history of the world.... From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world. It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history—in the history not of England only, but of the English race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St. Lawrence. 'If I send an army to Germany,' he replied in memorable words to his assailants, 'it is because in Germany I can conquer America!'
This must be pronounced to be, at any rate, a very near approach to that perception which Mr. Seeley denies to his predecessors, of the truth that in the eighteenth century the expansion of England was the important side of her destinies at that epoch.
Then there is Carlyle. Carlyle professed to think ill enough of the eighteenth century—poor bankrupt century, and so forth,—but so little did he find it common, flat, or uninteresting, that he could never tear himself away from it. Can it be pretended that he, too, 'missed the true point of view'? Every reader of the History of Frederick remembers the Jenkins's-Ear-Question, and how 'half the World lay hidden in embryo under it. Colonial-Empire, whose is it to be? Shall half the world be England's, for industrial purposes; which is innocent, laudable, conformable to the Multiplication Table, at least, and other plain laws? Shall there be a Yankee Nation, shall there not be; shall the New World be of Spanish type, shall it be of English? Issues which we may call immense.' This, the possession of the new world, was 'England's one Cause of War during the century we are now upon (Bk. xii. ch. xii.) It is 'the soul of all these Controversies and the one meaning they have' (xvi. xiv.) When the war was over, and the peace made at Hubertsburgh, Carlyle apprehended as clearly as words can express, what the issue of it was for England and the English race. England, he says, is to have America and the dominion of the seas,—considerable facts both,—'and in the rear of these, the new Country is to get into such merchandisings, colonisings, foreign settlings, gold nuggetings, as lay beyond the drunkenest dreams of Jenkins (supposing Jenkins addicted to liquor)—and in fact to enter on a universal uproar of Machineries, Eldorados, "Unexampled Prosperities," which make a great noise for themselves in the days now come,' with much more to the same effect (xx. xiii.) Allowance made for the dialect, we do not see how the pith and root of the matter, the connection between the transactions of the eighteenth century and the industrial and colonial expansion that followed them, could be more firmly or more accurately seized.
It would be unreasonable to expect these and other writers to isolate the phenomena of national expansion, as Mr. Seeley has been free to do, to the exclusion of other groups of highly important facts in the movements of the time. They were writing history, not monograph. Nor is it certain that Mr. Seeley has escaped the danger to which writers of monographs are exposed. In isolating one set of social facts, the student is naturally liable to make too much of them, in proportion to other facts. Let us agree, for argument's sake, that the expansion of England is the most important of the threads that it is the historian's business to disengage from the rest of the great strand of our history in the eighteenth century. That is no reason why we should ignore the importance of the constitutional struggle between George the Third and the Whigs, from his accession to the throne in 1760 down to the accession of the younger Pitt to power in 1784. Mr. Seeley will not allow his pupils to waste a glance upon 'the dull brawls of the Wilkes period.' Yet the author of the Thoughts on the Present Discontents thought it worth while to devote all the force of his powerful genius to the exploration of the causes of these dull brawls, and perceived under their surface great issues at stake for good government and popular freedom. Mr. Seeley does justice to the importance of the secession of the American colonies. He rightly calls it a stupendous event, perhaps in itself greater than the French Revolution, which so soon followed it. He only, however, discerns one side of its momentous influence, the rise of a new state, and he has not a word to say as to its momentous consequences to the internal politics of the old state from which the colonies had cut themselves off. Yet some of the acutest and greatest Englishmen then living, from Richard Price up to Burke and Fox, believed that it was our battle at home that our kinsfolk were fighting across the Atlantic Ocean, and that the defeat and subjection of the colonists would have proved fatal in the end to the liberties of England herself. Surely the preservation of parliamentary freedom was as important as the curtailment of British dominion, and only less important than the rise of the new American state. Even for a monograph, Mr. Seeley puts his theme in too exclusive a frame; and even from the point of his own profession that he seeks to discover 'the laws by which states rise, expand, and prosper or fall in this world,' his survey is not sufficiently comprehensive, and his setting is too straitened.
Another criticism may be made upon the author's peculiar delimitation of his subject. We will accept Mr. Seeley's definition of history as having to do with the state, with the growth and the changes of a certain corporate society, acting through certain functionaries and certain assemblies. If the expansion of England was important, not less important were other changes vitally affecting the internal fortunes of the land that was destined to undergo this process. Expansion only acquired its significance in consequence of what happened in England itself. It is the growth of population at home, as a result of our vast extension of manufactures, that makes our colonies both possible and important. There would be nothing capricious or perverse in treating the expansion of England over the seas as strictly secondary to the expansion of England within her own shores, and to all the causes of it in the material resources and the energy and ingenuity of her sons at home. Supposing that a historian were to choose to fix on the mechanical and industrial development of England as the true point of view, we are not sure that as good a case might not be made out for the inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton as for the acquisition of the colonies; for Brindley and Watt as for Clive and Hastings. Enormous territory is only one of the acquisitions or instruments of England, and we know no reason why that particular element of growth should be singled out as overtopping the other elements that made it so important as it is. It is not the mere multiplication of a race, nor its diffusion over the habitable globe that sets its deepest mark on the history of a state, but rather those changes in idea, disposition, faculty, and, above all, in institution, which settle what manner of race it shall be that does in this way replenish the earth. From that point of view, after all, as Tocqueville said, the greatest theatre of human affairs is not at Sydney, it is not even at Washington, it is still in our old world of Europe.
That the secession of the American colonies was a stupendous crisis, Mr. Seeley recognises, but his dislike of the idea that their example may be followed by other colonies seems to show that he does not agree with many of us as to the real significance of that great event. He admits, no doubt, that the American Union exerts a strong influence upon us by 'the strange career it runs and the novel experiments it tries.' These novel experiments in government, institutions, and social development, are the most valuable results, as many think, of the American state, and they are the results of its independence. Yet independence is what Mr. Seeley dreads for our present colonies, both for their own sake and ours. If any one thinks that America would be very much what she now is, if she had lost her battle a hundred years ago and had continued to be still attached to the English crown, though by a very slender link, he must be very blind to what has gone on in Australia.[2] The history of emigration in Canada, of transportation in New South Wales, and of the disastrous denationalisation of the land in Victoria, are useful illustrations of the difference between the experiments of a centralised compared with a decentralised system of government. Neither Australia nor Canada approached the United States in vigour, originality, and spirit, until, like the United States, they were left free to work out their own problems in their own way. It is not the republican form of government that has made all the difference, though that has had many most considerable effects. Independence not only put Americans on their mettle, but it left them with fresh views, with a temper of unbounded adaptability, with an infinite readiness to try experiments, and free room to indulge it as largely as ever they pleased. As Mr. Seeley says, the American Union 'is beyond question the state in which free will is most active and alive in every individual.' He says this, and a few pages further on he agrees that 'there has never been in any community so much happiness, or happiness of a kind so little demoralising, as in the United States.' But he proceeds to deny, not only that the causes of this happiness are political, but that it is in any great degree the consequence of secession. He seems to assume that if we accept the first proposition, the second follows. That is not the case. Secession was a political event, but it was secession that left unchecked scope and, more than that, gave a stimulus and an impulse such as nothing else could have given, to the active play and operation of all the non-political forces which Mr. Seeley describes, and which exist in much the same degree in the colonies that still remain to us. It is the value that we set on alacrity and freshness of mind that makes us distrust any project that interferes with the unfettered play and continual liveliness of what Mr. Seeley calls free will in these new communities, and makes us extremely suspicious of that 'clear and reasoned system,' whatever it may be, to which Mr. Seeley implores us all to turn our attention.
[2] The story has been recently told over again in a little volume by Mr. C. J. Rowe, entitled Bonds of Disunion, or English Misrule in the Colonies (Longmans, 1883). The title is somewhat whimsical, but the book is a very forcible and suggestive contribution to the discussion raised by Mr. Seeley.